Idea Sprouts Online Marketing Blog

A Step by Step Guide to Creating Facebook Offers

Facebook Offers are now available to Facebook Pages that have over 400 likes. If you haven't seen an Offer before, it's a discount or promotion you can create on your Page to reach customers.

There are a few things I really like about Offers.

1. You create it, so you can control the offer that is being made. That's very nice if you've seen some of the over the top Groupon deals that really don't make much money for businesses.

2. They can become viral on Facebook. When you create an offer, it's on your Facebook Page, but every time someone claims the offer, it shows up in the news feed for all of their friends to see.

That's exactly what happened with a recent Offer from the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Florida. I saw the offer claimed by a few friends of mine and I was intrigued to see what the offer was all about. And if I claimed the offer, my friends would see it and so on.

Now imagine this happening with your Offer. It can be a good way to get found by new potential customers.

3. You can choose where to offer your deal. With the Biltmore offer, it was only valid for Florida residents.

4. An Offer can be online or in store (or both). A lot of times, online business get left out in the cold. But now they can create nice offers for their customers too.

So let's get started with your Facebook Offer!

Step by Step Guide to Creating a Facebook Offer

1. Go to your Page

Select Offer, Event and then choose Offer

2. Decide where to have the Offer

You'll be able to select Online Only, In Store Only or Both for your offer. This gives you great control and can help you boost one part of your business if you need it.

3. In Store vs. Online

For In Store offers, you can add a barcode to make the process easier to handle in your store when people redeem the offer.

For Online offers, you enter a redemption code that people will use during checkout to take advantage of the offer.

4. Make your Offer Irresistible

You only have a small amount of text you can use for the headline, so use it wisely. State what the offer is and make it good!

You also have the opportunity to upload a small photo and this is another place to grab people's attention. Use an eye-catching photo that will stand out on people's news feeds. You should use photos of your product or people using your product or service - not a logo.

4. Preview

Once you have everything as you want it, preview it and make sure it looks good. If you've entered a barcode, test it to make sure it works and do the same for your online redemption code.

Warning: once an offer is live, you cannot edit it. Be sure that everything is as you want it, because the Offer will be live until it expires.

5. Set a Budget

You can decide how much you want to pay for a certain amount of people to see your offer. You can start with $5, but that $5 may not get the offer to many people. The reach you get with $5 will depend on the amount of likes on your Page.

If you are using Facebook Offers for the first time, it's free.

More Details on Facebook Offers

You can place a limit on the number of people who can claim your offer. So keep this in mind when creating your offer. Do you want to offer something really juicy but only to a smaller number of people? Or do you want to open it up to everyone and give them 15% off their next order? I suggest testing both to see what kind of results you get.

You can create terms and conditions to your offer, so you have control on what people can use the offer on. For example, you may want to restrict a coupon from sale items.

You can put an expiration date on the offer. Perhaps you only want to make the offer valid during your slow season in order to boost sales.

Will you create a Facebook Offer on your Page? Are you excited about them?

Comments

Hi Allison, Haven't had much experience thus far with creating Facebook offers, so thanks for the informative post. I'm kind of curious what feedback others who have used the feature can offer either in your community or on BizSugar about its effectiveness.

I plan on testing it for the upcoming holiday season. Many of my clients have Facebook fans that aren't on their email lists and therefore don't get all of their special offers. This can be a great way to take Facebook fans and have them take advantage of an offer and become a customer.

I'll be sure to write another post with the results from testing out Facebook Offers.